From providing co-working space to acting as incubator and helping build a network, the startup has turned out to be a community space for entrepreneurs
91springboard co-founders: Anand Vemuri (left), Pranay Gupta (centre) and Varun Chawla
Image: Edric George for Forbes India
On a balmy evening in November 2018, the auditorium at a co-working hub at Santacruz in suburban Mumbai was brimming with a discerning audience of roughly 100. Lucy Plummer, head of content and community at Clap Global, a platform that enables a unique exchange of cultures by helping international travellers visit local classrooms and engage in conversations with students, had just 400 seconds to make her presentation. The topic of the talk, at an event hosted by 91springboard, was: ‘How travel helps transform bias’. It was a Japanese storytelling event called PechaKucha—or chit-chat—that lets speakers use 20 pictures, each that’s on screen for not more than 20 seconds, to narrate their story.
“The more I travel, the more opportunities I get to come face to face with my biases,” Plummer told the audience. For instance, in 2015, an unexpected encounter with an elderly lady in a Tibetan refugee camp in North Karnataka made Plummer uncover a bias she didn’t know she was harbouring: ‘Good people (the West)’ and ‘bad people (the East)’. “That bias ends with me,” she said, as the audience sprang to its feet and cheered.
(This story appears in the 01 February, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)